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No Body Said Anything When They Too The Doctor Of Common Sense Of YouTube.

Big tech’s coordinated purge of InfoWars — which was hit by bans from Apple, Facebook, Spotify and YouTube in rapid succession — did not occur in a vacuum. On this issue, Silicon Valley bowed to CNN journalists and Democrat politicians who ceaselessly lobbied for the site to be censored.
It’s a sign of how the concentration of power in America has shifted from big government to big tech that politicians are now lobbying tech companies rather than the other way round, but that’s exactly what happened over the course of the past few months, as Democrats applied relentless pressure on Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants to censor InfoWars.
Chief among them was Democratic Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL), who demanded that a Facebook representative “explain” their decision not to ban InfoWars at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on social media censorship last month. Calling Jones as “well-known conspiracy theorist” whose “brand is bullying,” Deutch also demanded Google’s representative explain how many strikes it would take for a channel on Google-owned YouTube to be deleted.

He then asked Google’s representative if they thought conspiracy theories were a “problem,” and asked her to explain the company’s planned solutions. It seems that YouTube has now come up with a solution: ban the channels that Rep. Deutch objects to.
At a previous hearing on social media censorship, Deutch, who represents Parkland, Florida, attacked tech companies for allowing “vile and outrageous and offensive garbage” on their platforms.
Multiple other congressional Democrats, including Reps. Jerrold Nadler, Jim Hines, and Ted Lieu have attacked the very idea of big tech censorship, calling Republican concerns a “conspiracy theory” and defending the right of tech giants to censor whomever they want.
Far-left media also played a role in demanding tech giants appoint themselves as the arbiters of free speech. Here’s the Guardian attacking Facebook for continuing to host InfoWars, and here’s BuzzFeed’s Joe Bernstein wondering why Twitter hasn’t followed Facebook, YouTube, Spotify and Apple in today’s purge. Bernstein was retweeted by CNN’s Oliver Darcy by the way.
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Joe Bernstein
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@Bernstein

All of these removals put @Twitter and @Jack in the very uncomfortable position of being the only major social network to disseminate @infowars. Imagine explaining that to your employees!
12:16 PM – Aug 6, 2018
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“Facebook Wants To Cut Down On Misinformation. So Why Isn’t It Doing Anything About InfoWars” was the not-so-subtle headline at the Washington Post last month.
Perhaps the most strident was CNN, which repeatedly lobbied YouTube to demonetize InfoWars and ban Alex Jones. They also went after Facebook on the same issue, stating the social media “struggles to explain why InfoWars isn’t banned.” News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch has also attacked big tech for allowing “scurrilous news sources” to gain traction on the web.

What does this mean? It means that Democrats are pressuring social media companies to give them free political favors by granting them a free platform while denying one to their critics.
It also means that the corporate media are all working overtime to remove their competitors on social media.
And it’s working.

Alex Jones Gets to Declare a ‘Real Info War’ Against Big Tech ‘in It Together

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Leftist website Slate recently published an article titled “Alex Jones Gets to Declare a Real Info War Now” in which the publication described the actual censorship that Jones suffered while claiming that he has not really been prevented from airing his ideas.
Slate published an article recently discussing the recent purge of Alex Jones and InfoWars pages across social media. Facebook, Youtube, and Apple all removed InfoWars content from their platforms in the space of a single day, which seems to imply that tech companies may be colluding with each other when they decide who should be de-platformed.
The Slate article states:
War or not, Alex Jones fans still have plenty of options to get their fix of right-fringe conspiracy-laden news: Beyond Infowars’ website, there’s the organization’s mobile app, which is still currently available for download in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. Slate first reported Monday morning that the Infowars app was still up in the Apple App Store despite the Apple podcast removal. At that time, the app ranked No. 56 in the App Store among news apps. By Monday evening, following the removals from Facebook and YouTube, Jones’ app had climbed to No. 7.
Though Apple might merit credit for giving the other platforms some cover to take more serious action against Jones, who has been using the sites to disseminate frequently harmful false stories for years, the fact that Infowars continues to have an app on Apple’s App Store is glaring. For what it’s worth, Infowars still has a presenceon LinkedIn and Instagram, too. But Monday’s bannings—and Jones’ response to them—raise a new question: Will the platforms’ actions diminish the reach of Jones’ conspiracy theories? (The more infamous of them include the false assertions that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax and that the survivors of the Parkland, Florida, shooting are crisis actors.) Or will Jones be able to use the bans to paint himself as a free-speech martyr, further cementing his audience’s devotion?
According to Slate, because Infowars can still use its LinkedIn account, they haven’t reallybeen censored. While Infowars may retain access to its LinkedIn and Instagram profiles, the majority of its social media following was based around Facebook and YouTube. While it may still have access to those that follow on LinkedIn, its YouTube subscribers and Facebook follower figures far outweigh the LinkedIn following.
Slate then bemoans the fact that these platforms didn’t ban InfoWars earlier, calling Jones a “bigoted fabulist.”
One of the great ironies in this mess is that YouTube, Facebook, and Apple are all deciding to enforce community moderation policies against hate speech that they’ve long had on their books. Any one of them could have taken this action years ago. But they didn’t, perhaps fearing that they’d be labeled as censorious liberals executing a political agenda, as if there’s anything particularly partisan about preventing a popular and bigoted fabulist from using your services to spread lies that are leading to real-world harm. They helped Jones exit the fringe and penetrate the mainstream. Now their fear could be realized—they’re being labeled as left-wing tech companies acting out a political agenda by right-wing media critics.
And almost proving the collusion that many have feared, Slate states that big tech companies are “in it together,”
At least the tech companies are in it together. And, of course, Jones’ fans aren’t at a total loss: Their favorite broadcaster spent the day posting videos on Twitter, collecting likes and retweets by the thousands.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/07/slate-alex-jones-gets-to-declare-a-real-info-war-against-big-tech-in-it-together/

6 Questions that Tech Giants Refuse to Answer About the InfoWars Ban

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InfoWars
7 Aug 20186,349
Even though the internet is aflame with controversy over the coordinated purge of Alex Jones and InfoWars from Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple, there is no real transparency over their decision and the process by which it was made.
Alex Jones and InfoWars have been top Twitter trends for hours, and even some left-wing journalists like Michael Tracey are decrying Silicon Valley’s Masters of the Universe appointing themselves the arbiters of free speech on the web.
But Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube have offered, at most, only copy and paste explanations for why they banned InfoWars content from their platforms — or why, after months of pressure from the Democrats and CNN, they all came to the same decision on the same day. Questions about transparency have a much broader scope that just the case of InfoWars and Alex Jones. Beyond the banning of other individuals such as Tommy Robinson, the same questions apply to a whole host of actions by the Masters of the Universe, including partnering with foreign governments to shut down accounts, shadowbanning users to limit the scope of their engagement, and mass user purges.

Breitbart News sent the following questions to Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple earlier today, and have yet to receive a real answer for most of them. Apple and YouTube chose to provide the same canned statement they provided to all other media outlets who contacted them, while Facebook and Spotify ignored our request entirely.
THE QUESTIONS SILICON VALLEY WON’T ANSWER
1) What content specifically from InfoWars/Alex Jones was found to be”hate speech” and otherwise rule breaking?
InfoWars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson confirmed to Breitbart News that none of the tech giants that targeted InfoWars and Alex Jones over the past 24 hours pointed to specific content that violated their terms of service.

2) When was the decision to ban them made? What changed over the course of a few days from when you defended not banning Infowars content?
Just a few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg defended InfoWars in an interview, saying: ” “The approach that we’ve taken to false news is not to say, you can’t say something wrong on the Internet… Everyone gets things wrong, and if we were taking down people’s accounts when they got a few things wrong, then that would be a hard world for giving people a voice and saying that you care about that.”
So what changed, why suddenly, and why concurrently with most other major platforms?
3) Who made the decision to take down Infowars?
It’s unlikely that the decision to ban InfoWars was taken by a rank-and-file content reviewer.
4) Will you provide clear guidelines on “hate speech” including defining hate speech in a manner that is clear to all users?

When pressed by a member of Congress earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that he couldn’t define “hate speech.” Yet that is the reason that Facebook and other platforms gave for banning InfoWars and Alex Jones today. Do they now have a definition? If so, what is it?
5) How does big tech plan to manage the incoming wave of demands to censor and remove content from other conservative sites?
Like this one, for example:
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Hilary Rosen
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@hilaryr

These companies (Facebook, Apple, YouTube, etc) will remove Alex Jones #InfoWars (and I agree) from their content offerings but not a know sexual predator? #MuteRKelly. RT if you are confused about how seriously they take sexual assault #TimesupWOC
11:55 AM – Aug 6, 2018
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101 people are talking about this
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6) Did Facebook/YouTube/Apple/Spotify communicate or coordinate with Google/YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other tech platform that recently banned InfoWars content prior to the takedown of Alex Jones and InfoWars’ content? Did any representative or employee of those companies reach out to Facebook/YouTube/Apple/Spotify before they undertook similar bans?
There was no apparent catalyzing event immediately prior to the censorship.
Here are the responses Breitbart News received from two of the companies contacted in their entirety.
YouTube:
All users agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines when they sign up to use YouTube. When users violate these policies repeatedly, like our policies against hate speech and harassment or our terms prohibiting circumvention of our enforcement measures, we terminate their accounts.

Apple:
Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users. Podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming. We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions
The other companies contacted by Breitbart News did not respond.
On a day that has left evening left-wingers like the HuffPost asking “why now?” the one thing that is clear is that the tech Masters of the Universe have some explaining to do.

I will be going on a 30 day absence from FaceBook. I have also deleted my Twitter account because they are Anti-Christian They are suffering and they are losing money so we should punish them the way they have done us. I will be off FB until August 25, 2018. If you want to follow us please go to our Website, Video Platform, And The Radio Show.

It has been said “don’t kick a man when he is down”, but hell that is the best time to kick a corrupt SOB.

We must stop allowing FB, Youtube, and Twitter to hold us hostage any longer. So I challenge you to do the same.

Facebook Stock Decline Is Largest One-Day Drop in U.S. History

Facebook’s drop in stock price of nearly 20 percent marks the largest one-day stock market decline in U.S. history, at $119 billion.

Facebook has had a tough few days, seeing a massive decline in its stock price which fell by as much as 23 percent in after-market trading on Wednesday. The mass stock sale saw approximately $119 billion in market value destroyed, marking the largest one-day drop in the history of the American stock market.

The sudden drop in Facebook stock was a result of the announcement of second-quarter earnings which did not meet the companies predicted numbers. Although revenue had increased by approximately 42 percent, the number still fell short of analyst projections.

Similarly, the number of daily active users on the platform — an important metric for judging the success of a website or app — only grew by 22 million, the lowest growth figure since 2011. Facebook’s Chief Financial Officer warned that revenue growth would “decline by high single-digit percentages” until 2019.

In September 2000, during the original dot-com bust, Intel lost $91 billion while around the same time Microsoft lost $77 billion in a day. While it is true that Facebook’s loss of $119 billion in a day is the biggest one-day drop in U.S. stock market history, it should be noted that the large loss is partly due to Facebook’s massive valuation as a company. In previous years, companies were not valued as highly as Facebook is so their losses were smaller.

However, Breitbart News has outlined the five main reasons that Facebook is facing such a tough time and the mistakes it made which led to its current situation.

They think it’s okay to censor you because they are taking bribes and kickbacks from the Lobbyist.

Legacy conservatives have sent a clear message to the masters of the universe in Silicon Valley. That message is: “we surrender!”

That about sums up the new, self-destructive tendency in the D.C. conservative establishment. A growing number of “free market” advocates are making the case that Facebook, a 2-billion user behemoth with no serious competitor, has every right to censor the conservative movement and its leaders.

According to this argument, Facebook isn’t an all-conquering monopoly with more power to shape opinion than the worst totalitarian governments of the 20th century. No — it’s just a little, innocent, “private company” operating in a “free market.” Just like a socially conservative cake shop in the midwest!

It’s genius, when you think about it. To counter the allegation that it censors conservatives, Facebook plans to work with conservatives who are totally OK with their movement being censored, as long as it’s a corporate superpower doing it and not the government.

It would be one thing if the think-tank conservative set were saying that the unchecked political power of Silicon Valley doesn’t warrant regulation yet, but holding out on the possibility of such regulation if things get worse. That, at least, would act as a deterrent, in much the same way that the Democrats’ threat of regulation is forcing Facebook to take action on fake news and data privacy.

But that’s not their argument. Instead, it’s the same tired 1980s dogma that free market competitors to Facebook and Google will fix the problem, and that regulation is never the answer.

“Facebook can ultimately make decisions about what kind of speech it wants to have on its platform” was the conclusion of Klon Kitchen, tech policy expert at the Heritage Foundation. Berin Szóka of TechFreedom, the go-to conservative for the “everything’s fine!” argument on social media censorship, argues that we just have to wait for the “next Facebook”, while disingenuously comparing all proposals for social media regulation to the Fairness Doctrine, a pre-1980s piece of legislation that stifled competition in broadcast media.

This argument, which can be paraphrased as “everything I don’t like is the Fairness Doctrine”, follows a similar logic to those that compare the construction of a border wall to the second coming of fascism.

None of these free market geniuses have grasped that Google and Facebook aren’t just monopolies (any first-grade economics teacher can tell you that a market dominated by monopolies is not “free”), they are unique in the vast power they have over the flow of information. No other organization in history has had the power to shape opinion, control public discourse, and influence democratic voters.

Facebook has the power to kill a news website by adjusting its algorithm without warning. They have already done so on two occasions. By signalling to news publishers that their standards are changing, Facebook has the power to change the way news organizations behave on an international scale. That’s to say nothing of their power to manipulate voter registration and turnout.

Google, meanwhile, holds a 90 percent market share in search and is even more terrifying in its power. Recent research has shown that the company can change the preferences of undecided voters by up to 80 percent, just by tweaking their search suggestions. The Soviet Union could only have dreamed of such manipulative power. And it all lies in the hands of one company, with no regulation and no oversight to contain it.

Nevermind the fact that these companies are monopolies. Even if they were not, their unaccountable political power deserves oversight in its own right. Social media companies are not like newspapers or radio stations. Nor, evidently, are they neutral platforms. They are something entirely new, and the problem of their unrivaled power cannot be addressed by reference to the past.

Don’t expect legacy conservatives to understand that, though. Armed with slogans from the 1980s, they’re still fighting the battles of a bygone era. They have abdicated the fight against the masters of the universe. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us should.

Suckerberg Paid His Wife To Have His Baby. He never had a girlfriend in school because he has zero social skills.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call to reporters that users who had a specific search functionality turned on should “assume” that their public profile has been scraped.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg on personal privacy 12 Hours Ago | 02:06

Facebook said Wednesday that it believes most of its users who had a specific search function enabled have had their profile data scraped by third parties.

“We’ve seen some scraping,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a call with reporters. “I would assume if you had that setting turned on that someone at some point has access to your public information in some way,” he said.

The setting Zuckerberg referred to is one where users let other users search for them by e-mail address or phone number instead of by name.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg on phone privacy setting 15 Hours Ago | 02:04

The company said earlier in a post from Facebook’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, that most Facebook users “could have” had their public profile scraped.

In a section discussing search and account discovery features, Schroepfer said this:

“Until today, people could enter another person’s phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them. This has been especially useful for finding your friends in languages which take more effort to type out a full name, or where many people have the same name. In Bangladesh, for example, this feature makes up 7% of all searches. However, malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery. Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way. So we have now disabled this feature. We’re also making changes to account recovery to reduce the risk of scraping as well.”

Hell Yes They Spy On You.

In the call with media Wednesday, Zuckerberg clarified further. “It is reasonable to expect… someone has accessed your information in this way,” he said.

This news is in addition to Facebook’s claims that political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica gained access to data from as many as 87 million Facebook users. Media reports had previously placed the number at more than 50 million.